I have personally used DVDXCopy, XPress and Platinum. Although these products have served me well, I am now using Shrink and Decrypter. The 321 products have caused chapter skipping on a number of movies, which this combination of DVD Shrink and DVD Decrypter do not. I feel that you will be xtremly pleased with the ease and results of ripping with DVD Shrink and burning with DVD Decrypter.

Simple DVD Backup Steps

First create a folder for your HD backup. Try to put it someplace where you won’t forget it (i.e. C:/All DVD Work/ (movie name will appear here).

Next download DVD Decrypter and under mode select “ISO, Write”. Un-tick the box that says “verify”. Where it says “source”, you’ll leave that blank, as DVD Decrypter will find the location of your backed up DVD file automatically. Lastly, where it says “Destination”, select the drive where your burner resides. Feel free to close DVD Decrypter; DVD Shrink will open it when it needs it.

Download DVD Shrink. Open it and click “Edit”, then click “Preferences” on this page we’re going to select “DVD Target Size” as custom and set the size as 4360MB - we do this to make extremely sure that our disc isn’t too large. Then under the “File I/O” tab un-tick “Enable burning with Nero” then click “OK”.

Place your original DVD in your DVD-ROM drive and a DVD blank in your burner’s drive. (Many people suggest using Ritek G04, Verbatim or media boasting “Advanced AZO Dye. All other media could very well cause errors, only the very best media should be used for DVD Video backups. Now is definitely not the time to put your cheap stuff in, although there are a lot of people that have success with the cheaper media including myself. )

Now, take just a second and under “Target Device” go to “Select target device” once there, select “ISO Disc Image”. NEXT, IMPORTANT, tick “Launch DVD Decrypter to burn the output image” box. Finally, where it says “Select target image file”, browse till you find your created folder for your backup and click “Save”. That’s it! Click “OK” and DVD Shrink burns that ISO image to your HD. It then opens DVD Decrypter and has it burn the ISO image to your waiting blank DVD.

P.S. Before you rip with Shrink, you have the option of selecting entire disk or selecting re-author. Most of the time before I rip with Shrink, I select re-author and then double-click on main movie. This moves over only the main movie to the left to be ripped. I don't even bother with the menus, as you can still select chapters with your player.